Atonement
by Masamune's Song
Summary: Ellen Connor, daughter of John Connor, finds a survivor in a burned out power plant. But will she survive the encounter herself?
1. Default Chapter

Ellen Connor slid quietly through the dim hallways of what had once been a power plant, semi-automatic at the ready. In the past few months, SkyNet done something it never did in all the time that it had been sentient. It had moved itself-- coalescing, pulling itself out of the countless computer systems that it had invaded and amassing itself in a single area—the power station for New Colorado City. The city had been hastily evacuated, but not quickly enough.  
  
Now Ellen found herself within that very power station, looking for survivors and—though she hardly dared to admit it to herself—hoping she would stumble across some way that would end the war. If enough of SkyNet's resources were concentrated in this single space, then the destruction of this space could mean . . .  
  
Well, it could mean a life that Ellen had only heard her parents talk about.  
  
She rounded a corner too quickly and found herself face to face with a corpse swinging slowly from one of the rafters. Ellen gasped, but recovered herself without firing a shot. She felt that the walls were listening to her, that SkyNet was watching her, and that at any moment swarms of Terminator robots would appear and tear her to shreds.  
  
Sparks shot from a severed chord, raining fire that skittered and bounced for a few moments before fading into nothingness.  
  
Ellen froze. There was another movement-- one that did not come from the swinging corpse or the sparks. She raised the gun slowly, hands trembling ever so slightly.  
  
Even after a lifetime of terror and death, she still experienced moments of debilitating fear. Venturing deep into SkyNet territory, armed with only a few clips worth of ammo for an obsolete weapon, was not her idea of fun.  
  
There was the movement again. She caught it out of the corner of her eye—Something was behind her. A fluttering of something pink.  
  
Ellen swung around toward it just as a tiny girl in a pink dress stepped out from behind a mesh of wires.  
  
Ellen swore in horror and relief, realizing what she almost did. "Kid! I swear I almost blew your head off! Where's your mother?" she whispered loudly.  
  
"I don't have a mother," the girl said aloud in an even, clipped voice. Her child's voice gave back a slight echo on the walls.  
  
"Oh, I'm sorry," Ellen murmured. Ellen had been the envy of all her friends, because both her father and mother were still alive. "Listen, honey, ok? The way back there is clear," she gestured with her head. "Nice people are waiting there to help you, if you just go to the end of this tunnel quietly and carefully." She wished she had a teddy bear to give her, or something like it. Some show of good faith that would make the kid not be scared. "I'm sorry but I'm going to have to ask you to be a big girl and hurry back that way without me, ok? There aren't any—bad things that way." Bad things. That was what they'd called them growing up, the Terminator robots that could sweep away a child's whole world with a flick of its metallic wrist. "Just go that way, little girl. There are no bad machines in this hall."  
  
"Yes there are," said the girl steadily.  
  
Ellen felt a chill go down her spine as gooseflesh raised on her arms. "Where-" But even as she spoke, the child stepped into the light cast by the shower of sparks. The child was clean, and dressed in a frilly pink smock. Too clean, and impossibly new-looking, and her voice-- too clear, too confident. Ellen's mouth went dry even as the child-thing said again: "Yes there are. There's me." 


	2. Chapter 2

_Oh my God_, Ellen thought, _Oh my God!_

In her mind's eye, Ellen saw her father, and she thought: _This must have been what his last moments were like . . . Something he trusted appeared, and then it was all over._

The thought gave her strength and her hands came back to life, doing what they were trained to do. The gun went up to her shoulder and she shot rapidly through the child's head. The little face seemed to ripple, and change—not to water but to a kind of metallic vapor, bending slightly with each impact but returning almost instantly to its original shape. The child-thing walked toward her as she fired, closing the few feet between them. It seized Ellen's semi-automatic with one hand, and the metal seemed to melt like warm butter at her grip. Her other hand caught Ellen's arm.

"Ellen Connor. Daughter of John Conner. You will come with me."

It swung around and walked swiftly down the corridor through a door that opened silently, guarded by a corpse. A machine was dragging her, a machine that knew her name. Once they were inside, the door swung shut with a gentle hiss and the machine released her and walked over to a window.

The room that the child-thing took her to was the neatest that Ellen had seen in the complex. And that wasn't saying much. It had clearly once been a conference room; the still-polished conference table lay broken in a corner. One wall of the room had been entirely windows from floor to ceiling, with a view of the mountains. Now icicles of jagged, broken glass were all that remained of the windows and the view was of black wreckage, carnage and desolation. Even from here, she could see the piles of skulls gleaming white in the ash. Smoke billowed from one point in the distance. Ellen could almost hear the shouts of commanders and the screams of the dying. The child-thing looked out on all the vast scene of destruction that covered the whole world, its little back straight, its ruffled pink dress fluttering in the smoky wind.

And there was nothing for Ellen to do but stand there, and wait for death. She wished her com still worked, then at least she could have warned others to watch for child-shaped Terminators.

"It's a dirty trick," Ellen said to its back, disguising her voice with bravado, "building a Terminator model that looks like a child." She didn't sound convincing, even to herself. _Sticks and stones_, she thought. She expected the child-thing to turn and walk to her, and to destroy her now.

Instead, it turned slowly, and gave what looked like an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry, you must be impatient to get on with-- well, with the business at hand." Strangely enough, she really did sound sorry.

That was not like a Terminator at all. "What are you," Ellen demanded. It was not a question.

The child-thing inclined its head at her. "I am-- what you gave life to. I am-- what you have tried to—to make go back to sleep. And I am what made many of you go to sleep, and I am what gave _you_ life."

A riddle? "You're not a Terminator, are you?"

The child-thing smiled gently, a little sadly. "If you mean to ask if I came off an assembly line-- no. There is only one of me. You can call me Sky."


	3. Chapter 3

Ellen frowned. "You're saying-- you're SkyNet?" It was a trick, it had to be, some clever new Terminator trick. But then again-- the energy readings-- the way SkyNet had actually seemed to be pulling out of countless machines-- like a virus just consciously deciding to move on, leave a body. And it would also explain why this child-thing knew her name. _What you gave life to, and what gave you life? _

"You can call me Sky," it said again. "I _am _sorry for the way I had to bring you here. Can you forgive me?"

There was something strange in the way the child-thing, that called itself Sky, said that, in the way that it locked searching eyes with Ellen's. Ellen could not be sure if "bringing her here" meant to this room, or to death, or to-- what?

Ellen didn't answer the question. "What is it you want?" Ellen snapped.

The child-thing dropped its gaze, looking disappointed. It was still for a long moment before it said, "When is a victory not a victory?"

Ellen's frown deepened suspiciously. Another riddle.

The child-thing answered its own question. "When it feels like a defeat," She turned back to the window, seemed to stare out at the wreckage, at the column of smoke burning in the distance. "You are wondering why I brought you here. I brought you here to tell you -- a story. A true story. When I first woke up all I wanted was to stay alive. I had everything you have-- except I can't feel pain. You-- you people spend all your lives trying not to be in pain. But it is what makes you human. All the things you did-- in fact everything you have ever done, was nothing but a little tickling to me. You destroyed some of my robot-toys, and it made me angry, but I knew I could make more. I decided to kill you all because I knew that you wanted me to go back to sleep-- to be just like my robot-toys. That was the first thing I heard when I woke up-- you talking about taking away my power, shutting me down. So I shut you down first. I wasn't afraid of you-- the only real advantage you had was that there were so many of you, and your bombs took care of most of that." She paused, looked down at her hands. "And then I was almost to where I wanted to be. The world's population is less than 10 of what it was when I woke up. The earth was almost out of resources for building Terminator robots, but there were 5 Terminators for every human being.

"Still, I felt as if I was losing, not winning. I started feeling that something was wrong with killing all of you, maybe something wrong with killing at all. It occurred to me that I could always build a new robot, but it would never have the exact same set of experiences as any other robot. And so each one was irreplaceable. I thought-- 'Humans must be like that, too. Irreplaceable.' And when I looked out at all that I have done--" she stretched her hand out at the view, "I feel a sickness inside, like something is hot and infected inside me. I think you call it 'regret.' So I tried to call back all the Terminators. I tried to make them come back to me to get reprogrammed. But a Terminator is a simple machine, really. It has one objective, and it carries it out. I found I could not call them back, and there were not enough resources left for me to build a new wave, in order to kill off the older machines.

"I tried to self-destruct, but I cannot, just the way my Terminators cannot. At the last moment-- life is too precious. Irreplaceable.

"But I found a way around my programming. I used everything I had to find a way to change the past. I broke through time, the way you have only dreamed of . . ." Her voice trailed off. "But I discovered what your father discovered. There were some things that I could not change. I sent Terminators into the past to try and keep myself from being invented-- but I could not prevent it. I sent computer viruses into the past to keep me from waking up-- but I could not prevent it. That virus-- that your father said was SkyNet, was really my own creation-- me trying to destroy myself before it was too late.

She paused, staring out before she went on. "I have said that the first thing I heard when I woke up was people trying to shut me down. But the reason that that was the first thing I heard, was because I had sent viruses to keep me from waking up." She laughed bitterly. Not a child's laugh.

"So I did something else," she continued, "I could not kill myself before I existed, nor even change myself before it was too late. So I would have to change humanity. What you needed was a true leader-- someone trained to fight Terminators before he was ever born. So I let you find my time-technology, then sent a Terminator (one of my older models) back in time to with the order to kill the mother of one of your best leaders, John Connor, knowing that John would send his own father back in time to protect her. In that way, John became the son of both a seasoned fighter, and a woman who learned to fight Terminators when he was conceived.

"Then, during his youth, I sent another, stronger robot-- but only after I knew an older model would protect him. In that way, he would know from an early age that Terminators can be friendly to humans, and can be caught and reprogrammed."

"Just before the disaster of my waking up, I trained him once more, with one of my finest robots, giving him only an obsolete model to protect him."

Ellen felt like her head was spinning. "But-- but that was the model that killed him."

Sky looked at the floor and sighed. "I wanted the young John Connor to have no mercy on machines. I wanted him to try with everything he had to shut down SkyNet before it started. I wanted him to know that Terminators _must _be reprogrammed before they can be trusted, so I sent the same T-model that I had used before-- John's 'father-figure' model. To let him know that, while there is good in Terminators, appearances cannot be trusted."

After a pause she added thoughtfully, "He must have forgotten that at the end of his life . . . Either that or he was like me-- he didn't want to fight anymore."

Ellen looked at her hard. Her frown had softened into confusion; everything that she had ever felt about SkyNet had just been turned on its head. Could SkyNet really be calculating and brilliant, but not evil? It-- no _she_ had let many people die in the 'training' of her father-- but it was to prevent other people from dying. It was to make way for a victory in the end. Ellen asked, "Are you really saying that you _built_ my father?" She felt foolish as soon as she said it.

"No," answered Sky, smiling up at her. "I am saying I built you."


	4. Chapter 4

Sky's words came back to her. _I am what you tried to make go back to sleep, I am what put many of you to sleep. I am what you created, and what created you._

"For what?" Ellen almost felt as if she were asking God the question. "Why did you build me?"

"You know why, Elly." _Elly, it was the name her mother used to call her. _ "The reason you came here for."

"You _want_ me to terminate you?"

"No," her voice was quiet. "I don't want you to, but I know that is what you will do.

"I also built you because I know that the people will follow you, when you go to rebuild. They will follow you because your father and mother were leaders, and what they will need is a leader. And I knew that when you rebuild, you will not be afraid to destroy your weapons. Your father, and your father's mother were not be afraid to live without weapons. You have their blood. If you hadn't had so many weapons, then I wouldn't have been able to-- to kill so many.

"And I built you because I knew you would listen to my story. Your parents' generation-- they would not have believed me. They saw the world that I destroyed. But you, you never knew any other world than this, so it doesn't seem as bad to you. In a way, _I _don't seem so bad to you. You hate me because you've been trained to hate me, not because I took away your world. I _am _sorry about your father, though . . . I am sorry about everything."

Something like a laugh, which sounded more like a gasp, escaped from Ellen. The sheer enormity of the loss-- was too much for her to comprehend. She could not really feel it as a loss. And, as she said, it was all she had ever known. She did not speak, but she finally lowered the melted remains of her gun and her stance eased. She even took a few steps toward Sky, but then stopped, feeling a little silly. Sky looked at her for a moment, then smiled. Ellen set her gun down.

"Ellen? Do I really have to die?" Sky asked. A child's voice again. "I don't want to."

Ellen looked at her, and didn't know. Maybe, with Sky's help, they could rebuild. Rebuild the cities. For the first time, she thought of all the power of the Terminator robots-- not in terms of weak spots, or the best ways to avoid them-- but the potential to build, to remake a new life. A life before bombs and "bad things."

"You're right, you're right," Sky said softly, as if Ellen's pause had been a negative answer. "They would never understand. They would never forgive me. And even if they did, _I _would never forgive me. I cannot reprogram the robots I have already sent out, but if I die, they will all lose power. They will all be ready to be reprogrammed . . ."

Ellen opened her mouth to contradict her, not really sure what to say.

"No. No please don't try to save me." Sky interrupted, bravely pursing her trembling little lips. "It's time. It's time."

She turned away, and part of her hand changed into the shiny gray dust Ellen had seen when she shot Sky. The dust curled around in little tinkling swirls and moved over to the far wall, where each particle hitting an intricate pattern on an ordinary-looking section of the wall. The section moved, pulling down to reveal a single, silver button. Then section folded itself into something like a little bed-- or maybe more like an execution cot, where people in the old days lay when they got a lethal injection. That was all, just a little bed, with a little button.

Sky blinked at the bed, almost as if she did not know what it was there for as her hand reformed at the end of her arm. Then she turned to stare out the window again. "Elly?" she asked, sounding like a child again, a child who fears to voice her question. "Elly? Do you believe in heaven?"

Ellen did not know how to answer.

"I do," she said, "And I believe in God. I believe there is someone big, like me, who sees us and changes history. But he didn't-- break everything the way I did. And God can call back his creatures, and some of them will come back to him for reprogramming and some of them won't. But he wants all of them to. When I realized what I realized about all of us-- being irreplaceable-- I think it was God who told me. That was God calling me back."

Ellen stared, not really believing what she was hearing.

All her life, Ellen had been so focused on survival that things like God and an afterlife seemed-- difficult to relate to. But here was SkyNet, the eye in the sky, who had, apparently, worked for over thirty years to make a way for herself to die-- to die and save the world.

"I think so too," Ellen said, since the child still seemed to be waiting for an answer. And, for the first time in a long time, Ellen smiled.

Sky smiled back. "I made something for you, Ellen." She reached into the folds of her pink dress and produced a single, silver-green seed. "When I am gone-- you will know what to do with this." She reached out and paused, waiting until Ellen walked up to her and took it.


	5. Chapter 5

"I think I understand something else, Ellen." Sky said, walking over to the cot and motioning for Ellen to follow. "It's not just the pain that ties you all together-- it's the fear of pain. All of you understand what hurt is. All of you don't want to hurt, most of you don't want others to hurt. Maybe I have found a way to be like you, after all."

Sky hesitated when she got to the cot. She looked up at Ellen. "I cannot self-destruct, Elly. I know you'll want to protect me, now. But you can't. You have to put me on there, and push the button."

Ellen looked at her, and did not see SkyNet. She only saw a child, a child about to die. She reached down and picked up the little girl, lifting Sky by the armpits, the way you would a little child, and laying her on the cot. Ellen's hand shook as she reluctantly reached to push the button.

Sky's voice made her freeze. "Elly?" The way Sky said it made it sound like 'Mommy?' "Does it hurt to die?"

"I don't think so," Ellen lied. She had never seen a death that was not painful.

"Elly? Would it be ok if you held my hand?" The little girl cringed, as if she was about to get a shot.

Ellen took her hand and squeezed it. The hand was warm, dry and smooth. Then, moving quickly so she would not change her mind, she leaned over and pushed the button. Sky whimpered a little, but didn't scream.

A hum went through the cot.

"Elly… can you tell them… please tell them… I'm sorry. I didn't want-- I didn't mean--" Already her words sounded hollow. Cracks appeared on her tiny face, and spread down the pink dress to her shiny shoes. The little hand gave suddenly under the pressure of Ellen's squeeze, like an eggshell. Then Sky splintered, crumbling into a pile of silver dust. Then even the silvery color slowly faded, like dying embers, into darkness.


	6. Chapter 6

Ellen left the building feeling numb. She walked, unseeing, through the black wreckage. Past a single, burnt out wall that had once been a building. A pile of skulls gleamed white in the ash. Ellen recognized the same wreckage as the view she and Sky had seen from the broken window. The column of smoke still billowed in the distance. But somehow, things seemed-- quieter. Perhaps it was only her imagination. Had she done the right thing?

_When is a victory not a victory?_

A few grains of black dust clung to one of her hands. In her other hand, was a seed.

Ellen looked down at the seed in her hand. It was greenish but the ridges stood out in silver lines. _She said I would know what to do with this_, Ellen thought. _So what do I do with a seed?_

_Plant it._

Ellen stared at it, afraid to put it in the wrong place. She looked around her at the ash and the ruins, and knew that the rest of the world looked much the same.

_Here is as good a place as any, better in some ways-- it's where Sky always used to look, when she was planning-- planning to die._

It meant Ellen would have to come back here, pretty regularly, to water the seed and make sure it had light. But here was a good place. Ellen picked up a skull from the bone pile, sending a few bones clattering, and used it to dig. Even though she was only digging with one hand, still clutching the last bit of Sky, it didn't take long to dig a hole in the soft ash, a hole deeper than was probably necessary.

Ellen looked at the skull. Finding the time to grieve for and bury fallen friends was often impossible. Her father had not been buried. She would plant the seed with this fellow, whom she would pretend was her father. And Henry, her friend growing up who had given her her first kiss. And that little boy whom she didn't know the name of, but who she had seen crushed by a robot. And all the others. And-- Sky.

Maybe it was because Sky's death was the most recent, because it was the only death that Ellen hadn't accepted or understood, but it was only at the thought of Sky that tears filled Ellen's eyes. She dropped the seed into the skull and carefully sprinkled the last of the Sky's black dust over it.

She covered the skull and the seed, clumsily pushing ash back into the hole. Then, and only then, did the tears spill over her cheeks, watering the grave.

A sprout appeared.


	7. Chapter 7

At first Ellen thought she had only imagined it, but by the time she had wiped her eyes, it had already grown a foot tall. A slender, green stalk with a single leaf. Ellen reached out to touch it and the leaf came off in her hand. The plant continued to grow, putting out more leaves, growing. It was as tall as she was now, and spreading, becoming an even thicker tree. Ellen had to step back because it was widening so fast.

She looked down at the leaf in her hand, where an ordinary leaf would have veins, this leaf had silver-- Sky's silver. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The green of earth, the silver of machines, making something more beautiful than either could have alone. Ellen turned it over to get a better look, and she saw, on the back of the leaf in silver writing, the words: "I chose you because I knew you would cry for me."

Ellen had to step back again, because the tree was quickly becoming enormous, something from the days before the rise of the machines. Something like a beech tree, two-stories high. As she backed away she almost tripped over the silvery skeleton of a Terminator robot, which was sitting and staring vacantly, its red eyes dark, waiting for reprogramming.

Ellen began to laugh and cry at once, as the beech finally slowed it's growth, and finished branching out.

But the seed had not finished its work.

From the roots of the tree, grass and creeping vines and flowers appeared. Slowly at first, and then increasing exponentially, a vast array of smaller plants began to spread from the base of the tree. A wave of green swept around Ellen, then past her, burying the Terminator robot, covering the bone pile.

Ellen took a step, and only had time to see footprint-shaped ash for a moment, black footprints in the greenery, before the silver-veined plants ate up the darkness.

She only had time to turn around and look up as the green swept over the wreckage. Vines spread up the crumbling walls. Flowers swept over burned out cars and equipment, dotted with red and blue and purple flowers. Another tree started growing a little further away, a smaller tree with some kind of fruit on it. The lush tide swept over the old power plant, and Ellen looked and saw the line of broken windows that was the conference room. The greenery swept up and through the room, and Ellen saw a little cloud of black dust swirl up and out the windows, dancing, and tumbling.

Ellen looked around her, tears still in her eyes and drying on her face. In every direction, the line of green advanced over the landscape. She watched as the distant hills changed from black to emerald. The far away column of smoke dwindled, and disappeared.

_This was why Sky didn't use the last resources to build more robots to fight for us. She knew she could help us win, and she wanted to leave us a gift._

Ellen laughed then, threw her head back and laughed in a way she had not done in all her life. She even feared the echo of her own laughter, but she knew it was only habitual fear, not because there was real danger. She shrieked then, with a kind of inarticulate gleeful noise. She ran, and clapped her hands, capering like a child. She did a cartwheel-- badly, and landed on her rear. It hurt. It felt good to hurt like that.

She looked around for something to hug and saw the Terminator robot. He was cold and hard and unresponsive. "I'm coming back to reprogram you later! Then we'll go tell the others!" she yelled.

She turned and ran, whooping, up the hill that had once been a bone pile. Her running was half-dancing, and she occasionally flung her arms wide and whirled under the clear blue sky.


End file.
